Voice mail systems generally provide voice mailboxes that are assigned to users. Callers can send recorded messages to a particular user's mailbox. A user can interrogate an assigned mailbox, obtain a count of the number of messages left by callers and retrieve any messages that have been left by callers.
For each user, that is for each mailbox, the system stores the owner's name in the owners voice. When a message is sent to a mailbox, the sender hears a digitized recording of the recipient stating his name. This voice confirmation assures the sender that he entered the correct or the intended voicemail address. Should the sender hear a different name or a different voice than he was expecting to hear, he can cancel the sending of the voicemail or re-enter the voicemail address.
Another feature of present day voice mail systems is a feature generally called Dial by name. Should someone desiring to send a message not know a local recipient's voicemail address, he can spell the recipient's name using the telephone keypad. The voicemail system searches for a match in its list of user profiles, and on finding one or more, the voicemail system lets the sender select the desired recipient.
In recent years computerized voicemail systems have come into widespread use. Voicemail systems are commercially available from a wide variety of companies including Octel Communications Corporation, VMX Inc., International Business Machines, and others. U.S. Pat. No. 4,371,752 (Matthews) and U.S. Pat. No. 4,761,807 describe early computerized voicemail systems.
Present day voicemail systems are often interconnected in networks. Messages can be sent to users connected to the local system as well as users connected to remote systems. With present systems, when a message is sent to a user on a remote system, the local system "out dials" to the remote system in order to send the message. This out dialing generally takes place some time after the message was sent or deposited in the system. Since the local system has no information concerning the users connected to remote systems, when a message is sent to a user on a remote system, the response which the sender hears is not the same as the response which the sender hears when a message is sent to a user on the local system. In particular the sender can not hear an acknowledgement in the voice of the intended recipient. Furthermore since the local system does not have information concerning users on remote systems, the dial by name facility is not available for remote users.
One way of solving this problem is for the local system to maintain a directory with information and a voice response for each user on each remote system on the network. Such a solution is technically feasible, but it requires a large amount of memory to store all the information and furthermore it introduces system administration problems since the directory on each system in a network must be updated whenever there is a change in the users on any system in the network.
The presents invention provides a solution to the problem of handling messages sent to users on remote systems and to the problem of dialing by name the users on remote systems.